Re: special forms, take two (was Re: A lua version of "amb")

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 6:36 PM, Fabien <fleutot+lua@gmail.com> wrote:
> If a short lambda syntax would significantly reduce your programs' verbosity, you're probably not being hampered by silly language limitations, you're writing bad code in a language you don't understand. It might be almost decent Scheme code, but it's bad Lua code.

There is this idea that 'functional' means a whole different way of
doing things from 'imperative', and since we need to agree on words,
that's fine. But limited use of 'functional idioms' can make
mostly-imperative programs easier to read and write.

-- sort in the wrong order
table.sort(T,|x,y|(x > y))

-- apply a method of an object to an array of values

map(|x| (obj:f(x)), values)

-- call a function a little time later (useful idiom for synchronizing
with GUI thread)

doLater(||(obj:something()))

(that's the 'easier quoting' point of Jay)

Now, to be Devil's Advocate: because the quoting in the last statement
has become so terse, it becomes harder to read.  You now have to
become sensitive to the ||(...) idiom for quoting expressions.  So I
am not a 100% advocate of this proposal.

(BTW, making obj:something mean exactly the same as
|...|(obj:something(...)) would be a nice bit of sugar. Not a new
idea, either, of course.)

steve d.